My second assumption is that when people say something that isn't strictly true, they usually have some partial truth to rely on. So a politician who claims that he wrote all his own books may at least have hacked out a rough draft for others to work over and polish into grammatical English.
There's some subjectivity involved. One person's rough draft or first draft may be another person's rough notes. I don't doubt that ghost writers and heavy editing were involved. My hunch is that there was some kind of rough manuscript -- or a dictated version -- for Obama to base his claim of authorship on.
Maybe I'm wrong about that. Maybe it's the other way around. If you decide to lie, maybe you convince yourself that there's a half-truth in there somewhere. If Obama wanted to claim authorship, maybe he just convinced himself that his contribution was more than what it actually was.
I'm not sure that Andersen really knows much more than anyone else, though. He's putting two and two together -- Obama being friends with Ayers, Ayers being a better writer than Obama, Ayers supposedly helping his friends with their writing -- and concluding that Ayers was the ghost writer. I'm not wholly convinced that Anderson has the evidence or that he actually knows who wrote the book.
In any case, I have found references online to a "trunkload" of notes. That may be true and may have made it into the book, but when it gets magnified to a "truckload" of notes, you can see where I might be skeptical.
A trunk-load of notes is quite a few. I’m really not seeing the big issue here.
You are seeing what you want to see. For some reason you want to see Obama as capable of writing a rough draft. This is a personal sentiment on your part. So you read it into a situation where there is no indication that it’s the case. Nothing anyone can say to you, if you are determined to give Obama more credit than the evidence warrants, will change that. It’s an irrational position, and facts cannot counter irrationality.
I’ll just add that Obama doesn’t lie like ordinary, garden variety liars. He lies like a mentally ill man. Look at his Benghazi lies. There is no kernel of truth in them. They are wholesale, unvarnished, sociopathic lies. That is the way he lies all the time. It doesn’t emanate from fudging the truth, it derives from his mental illness. He lives in a separate reality where he really is one of the three best POTUSs that ever occupied the office. He really believes he is the smartest person in the room. [Look it up; there is an exact quote from his lips to this effect.] He honestly believes he’s in a league of his own. His lies proceed from this monstrously mistaken fantasy, and bear no resemblance to reality.
Mental illness is not a pretty sight. We can pity Obama, but we really need to stop propping him up and enabling him. There is zero actual evidence that he wrote anything connected w Dreams. Zero. If your desire to believe otherwise trumps the facts, be happy w the fantasy you have chosen.
Do you have a copy of Dreams? If so, would you be willing to do me a favor?